Scores of Taliban fighters were killed Tuesday evening as they attempted to storm a small U.S. outpost along the Pakistani border and were driven back by American soldiers, according to U.S. military officials in the province.

The insurgents launched the attack by firing rocket-propelled grenades and rifles from the grounds of two Islamic schools near Combat Outpost Margah, in eastern Afghanistan’s volatile Paktika province. The company of American soldiers stationed there fired back as large groups of fighters moved toward the base from a wadi, or valley, to the west, U.S. military officials said.

The fighting lasted less than two hours, ending by about 8:30 p.m. No U.S. troops were killed. A spokesman for the Paktika governor said that 50 to 60 insurgents were killed.

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“If they’re planning a massive attack, they may be able to muster a group of 100 around there,” Maj. Eric Butler, the brigade’s intelligence officer, said in an interview last week. For the Taliban, he said, “usually it ends very, very badly.”

Very badly indeed. The battles at Wanat and Kamdesh in the Kunar and Nuristan Provinces, respectively, involved tragic and heavy losses compared to most instances of Taliban massing of forces, but even at Wanat the U.S. had a kill ratio of approximately 6:1.

Tim Lynch notes that “Rarely now will somebody shoot at the Marines in southern Helmand, and when they do, it is from so far away that it is hard to notice anybody is even shooting at you.” The threat now is IEDs, and the Marines are suffering so many casualties that many of them, tragically, have issued standing orders to their Corpsman to let them die if they lose their gonads and are unable to reproduce.

The Taliban don’t fight conventionally – they fight asymmetrically. In Helmand now after Garmsir in 2008 when the Marines killed more than 400 Taliban fighters, and the hard work of Marines in Now Zad and Sangin, the threat is IEDs. In RC East it’s interesting that the Taliban see their position as so strong that outnumbering their opponent is still seen as asymmetric warfare, regardless of what the kill ratio actually shows.

Throughout the intense fighting, the besieged defending force of 36 U.S. and Afghan army soldiers fought off multiple suicide bombers and at least four overrun attempts by between 400 and 500 heavily armed insurgents, who had been trucked in from Pakistan and who managed to advance to within 5 m of U.S. positions. Afterward, the soldiers said they confirmed 115 kills but estimated at least 200 deaths. “It was the most coordinated thing any of us had ever seen, but just the sheer number of forces they had massing on that position was ridiculous,” Staff Sergeant Everett Bracey, of 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 2-27 Infantry Battalion, told TIME.

Information gathered before the start of the operation led Torres and his planners to believe that if the Taliban were to strike, they would most likely wait until night time, and that enemy strength would be anywhere from 50 to 80 at most. Instead, they met a force that was twice that size and dug into several defensive strongpoints on three dominating mountain ridgelines. They were armed to the teeth. When the Taliban opened fire, at about 7:30 a.m., there was total chaos.

“After maybe 15 seconds of the first shot being fired, the tree line essentially evaporated,” Torres recalled. “We had obviously walked into a kill zone.”

Within minutes, one Afghan National Army soldier lay dead. Several Taliban were also killed.

Pinned down by withering Taliban machine gun and sniper fire, punctuated with rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, Torres’ lead platoon became isolated south of the main element.

What happened over the next eight hours earned Torres the U.S. military’s third highest combat decoration for valor, and four of his fellow Soldiers Bronze Stars.